Dear friend,

With the budget cuts coming to the Department of the Interior, it’s plain that the $1.35 billion Biden Administration plan to massacre 450,000 barred owls from northern California to the Canadian border — “the hoot and shoot,” as it’s locally known — is a ghastly idea. This is one government program that we should all agree is inhumane, unwarranted, and wasteful.

U.S. Representatives Troy Nehls, R-Texas, and Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif., are leading efforts in Congress to block this slaughter of an American raptor.

Please take a moment today to call your U.S. Representative at 202-225-3121 and urge him or her to sign the Troy Nehls-Sydney Kamlager-Dove letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The letter urges him to maintain protections for barred owls under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The owls have been protected under U.S. law for more than 100 years.

And to make sure your views get registered, you can also send a note to your U.S. representative and also to your U.S. senators to register your objections to the barred owl kill. Go here to use our fast and easy form.

The signing deadline for lawmakers who want to join in on the House letter to Doug Burgum is noon tomorrow, so there’s no time to waste!

From the get-go, we’ve said that these night-time owl shoots would invariably fall short of the goal of protecting spotted owls because the control area is a staggering 24 million acres. Not only would the plan require a small army of sharpshooters to find and shoot these nocturnal birds, nothing would stop surviving owls in the surrounding area from flying in and replacing them. The plan would put the federal government on a never-ending owl-killing treadmill.

Our government should never have taken aim at a North American native owl species in the first place. Yes, they are competing with spotted owls, Great horned owls, and other species. That’s what happens in nature.

Now with the Trump Administration cutting programs, this plan should itself be a high-priority target for sidelining. Conducting a scaled-down kill would be even more futile, making it that much easier for surviving owls to replace the owls shot by the hunters. There’ll be no value to spotted owls — only costs in the form of dead owls and wasted taxpayer dollars.

The American public doesn’t want its own government to conduct the world’s largest-ever raptor slaughter. It doesn’t want owl-shooting in 14 units of the National Park Service in the Pacific Northwest. It doesn’t want the Endangered Species Act to be used as a sword to allow an assault on a North American native species. And it doesn’t want to spend a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a scheme that cannot work.

Range expansion by species is as natural as the sun rising or the clouds forming. That’s how ecological systems work, and it’s occurring every day, with hundreds of species.

Will you donate now to help us continue to fight this plan and make sure the forests of the Pacific Northwest don’t turn into killing forests for innocent owls?

If the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service goes down this road of managing social interactions between animals, where will it end? There are more than 1,300 federally listed threatened and endangered species, and you can be sure that there are thousands of other species competing with them every day in our nation.

We cannot victimize animals for adapting to human disturbances of the environment. Smarter, more strategic, life-affirming uses of the agency’s limited time and resources are what’s needed.

Again, in addition to calling your U.S. representative today, please send a letter to your U.S. Representative and two U.S. senators today using the form below to ask them to write to the Interior Department to abandon this forest-owl kill plan.

For the animals,

Wayne Pacelle President Center for a Humane Economy